Crank Cycling

At the end of every season you should take a break from focused training. I’m not saying you shouldn’t ride your bike…not at all! But you should stop looking at your heart rate monitor, your power data and even your personal training duration for a few weeks. This helps to relax the mind, rejuvenate and reboot yourself. We don’t often think about it, but disciplined training is mentally taxing; it’s just plain tiring. Sometimes at the end of a good season the body will feel like it is ready to keep going but the mind still needs a break.

After this ‘cooling off’ period I usually add very loosely-structured training with small goals to my riders’ training diaries. These goals are usually pretty simple: do a 4-hour ride 3 times a month, accumulate 3 to 5 hours of tempo per week or maybe do a club ride just for fun once a week. These workouts and weekly goals are low stress, low commitment and allow your brain to slowly get used to the mental workload that is coming when training season arrives.

Riders should find that rides during this time of the year are meant to be fun, motivating and inspiring. This is also the time when you should review how your riding and racing season went during the past year. New-found inspiration and motivation will help you see the future and all its possibilities. You should try to assess whether or not you’ve met the goals you set for yourself this past year and whether you want to try and improve on your gains. Maybe you want to attack those shortfalls that you may notice in this review. Maybe you’ll want to set entirely different goals for the coming year. It’s all possible, and it’s up to you!

Setting goals is paramount. If you’ve never set goals in past seasons you should try doing it this coming year. If my athletes are planning on competing in the upcoming racing season, I have them try to set at least three goals to strive for. After all, if you know what goals you want to achieve you can then measure how close you’ve come to attaining your desired results and make adjustments in successive years.

Setting goals is one of my favorite parts of riding and racing because I have the opportunity to entertain all the possible things I can try to accomplish, and that’s just fun! But remember: goals should be challenging and attainable. After you set some goals you should make sure to keep a record of the training you do, being sure to add comments about how you felt during and after your training sessions. You should also make sure to set milestone markers to measure whether you are moving in the right direction in order to attain your goals.

In my next blog post I’ll talk about setting accomplishable goals for your next season.

See you on the road,
Coach Jesse Eisner

Did you have goals this past season? Did you achieve them? If you need help setting goals for next season and you need direction in how to achieve those goals, let the coaches at Crank Cycling know. We can help!

So it is the end of your season and it has been a long one. You just finished the Everest Challenge which has 30,000 feet of climbing. Or maybe you just did a five day UCI stage race in the Caribbean. For some of the riders I coach, this is the way their season ended. When your season has ended with such lofty goals, you can be left with a lack of drive to continue training.

Some riders force themselves through periods where they lack motivation. This can, and usually does, lead to overreaching and eventually burnout or over training.

It is important to give ourselves time to relax from the rigors of training and racing even if you have come off a stellar season, accomplished your goals, and have a new level of fitness. It is important to remember that even if you are not physically overreaching or over trained, that you may be mentally tired. Our minds need just as much care as our bodies when it comes to recovery.

There are always alternative training methods to maintain and rebuild a high level of fitness. These alternatives can give us a break from a rigorous training schedule and still be fun. One method that some cyclists use is Cyclo-cross. Cyclo-Cross is like mountain biking and running mixed into the same workout on road style bicycles. Cylco-cross race courses are run on road, grass, and single track trails with minimal technical sections, but have areas where the rider must dismount and carry his or her bike while hurdling barriers.

Mountain biking is also another good alternative of riding. At the end of a long season, our training and competing can become only a means to an end. Sometimes this leads us to forget about the fun aspects of riding bicycles. Most of us started riding bicycles because it was fun and our competitive natures pushed us to compete on our bikes. Mountain biking leads us back to trails, keeps our brains engaged picking good lines on technical sections of these trails, and usually leads us to mud; and everyone knows that getting muddy is fun.

If you want to be as functional as possible in your off season, lifting weights is also a good thing to take up at the end of your season. Weight lifting is something you should talk with your coach or trainer about as you can very easily injure yourself lifting. Lifting weights should also incorporate the same movements that your cycling discipline does.

When starting to rebuild your overall fitness and transitioning into the off season, it is important to break up the rhythm of your training to include cross training and conditioning in a fun environment. Allowing your body to rest and recover from anaerobic efforts is important. Allowing your mind to rest from pushing yourself to accomplish your workouts is also very important. Training comes in building cycles. All building cycles whether weekly, monthly, or yearly should include rest periods.

Our long term goals as athletes should include rest, recovery, and relaxation at the end of a long season and taking that time will renew our inner drive. I am writing this blog post from Monterey, California, where I just took a few days off to relax, read books, and ride a mountain bike on beautiful Fort Ord, and believe me, I got muddy.

If you want to take your training to the next level, let the coaches at Crank Cycling know. We can help you meet whatever training goals you have!
See you on the road,
Coach Jesse Eisner

What are you capable of doing? Most athletes do not know what the top of their peak performance can be. One of the hardest parts of training is objectively viewing your own performance and determining whether your efforts are adding to a progressive or regressive state. We, as finite beings, are for the most part incapable of training to our personal best without some outside perspective. Productive training consists of disciplined efforts performed on a razors edge, trying to push beyond our current limitations to achieve what may seem impossible from the outset. We most often find what we are capable of doing by pushing beyond our current limitations to the point of failure. Failure is not a bad thing. Failure shows what our weaknesses are and points us in a direction in the pursuit of improving our performance.In a recent conversation with one of my clients, he shared that he thought he might be doing too much and was probably not capable of attaining some of our midterm goals. We discussed the workouts he had completed and his overall recovery.

Here are some important questions you can ask yourself to make sure you are not over training: Am I able to do and complete my workouts correctly? Am I recovering on my rest days? Am I staying healthy (not getting sick)?   This is where a power meter can be quite useful.   If an athletes is feeling good, but the power keeps improving, we know that the athlete is not over trained.

So objectivity will help us to determine our training progression. Pushing beyond our seeming limitations reveals our true limitations, and failure is just a learning tool.

All of these elements can be more easily attained when consulting with a coach. Crank Cycling coaches will help you to do all of these things. Give us a call! Let’s sit down and discuss how we can help you to assess your capabilities.

See you on the road,
Coach Jesse

Milk does not produce excess mucous.  That is a strange title for  an entry in this blog, but  it seems very appropriate  to my personal situation today.     I am suffering from a wicked headcold at the  moment.  A headlcold that may have been exacerbated by a high volume training cycle I completed on Sunday. ( and therefore relevant to cyclists, training and coaching)    I have  a slow nasal drip constantly coming out of my nose,  and down the back of my throat,  yet I  my head and upper respiratory  tract feel like they are holding so much pressure they are about to explode.    Basically, my head is full of mucous.     ( Doesn’t that paint a pretty picture?  I know some might say my head is full of something else) .   I’ve heard from more than one person today, that I should stay away from milk and dairy, as it increases mucous production.   My first instinct was: ” I don’t buy it”   But that could be because I love cheese; swiss cheese, cheddar cheese, pepper jack cheese, gorgonzola cheese, I love the stuff.    Cheese is one of the primary  reasons I need to drop 10lbs before track season starts.  (You can guess the other. It start with a B and end with an eer)  The other reason for my skepticism  is that I am not aware of any physiological  mechanism wherein dairy products produce mucous, but I have been wrong before, so I decided to do a little research.

The first article I found that came from a reliable source ( ie: journal article or similar)  was this:   Relationship between milk intake and mucus production in adult volunteers challenged with rhinovirus-2.

In this article, they gave people sinus infections, and then essentially  measured their snot by weight, and measured their other symptoms ( such as cough).  What the researchers  found was  “Milk and dairy product intake was not associated with an increase in upper or lower respiratory tract symptoms of congestion or nasal secretion weight.”   Basically:  Milk does not make mucous.   They also found what they called  “A trend … for cough, when present, to be loose with increasing milk and dairy product intake; however, this effect was not statistically significant“  What this means is that basically they think there  may have been a difference there, that milk may have made  the cough  more loose, but that  the researchers did not have enough data or statistical power to prove it.    To me, this seems like like a great reason TO  enjoy dairy while you have a sinus infection.  I would rather couch up some loose phlegm that comes up easily, rather than that thick stuff!

Then I found this:  The Milk-Mucus Belief: Sensory Analysis Comparing Cow’s Milk and a Soy Placebo.

In this study the researchers  performed a double blind study, and gave  subject either a milk , or  soy milk beverage that was indistinguishable from the milk .   Subjects reported increases in 3 of the mucous related variables when they drank the test beverage, but the effect was the same for  both the milk, and the placebo soy beverage.   The researchers “concluded that the effect measured is not specific to cow’s milk, but can be duplicated by a non-cow’s milk drink with similar sensory characteristics.“    Bascially, milk does not make mucous, but if you think it does, and if you think you are drinking milk, you may report more symptoms.   I am going off of the abstract on this one, and I would like to read the whole article so I can see a bit more of their statistics and physiology, but I’m not willing to pay $41.95 for the privilege.

Those first two are from the 90s, and I found more from that  time period, but this is the one that really sealed the deal:   Milk Consumption Does Not Lead to Mucus Production or Occurrence of Asthm is a well written review article from 2005 with 49 references.    These  Swiss researchers carefully reviewed the literature and determined that recommendations to abstain from milk and dairy  in order to  avoid  to increased mucous or asthma symptoms  is not supported by research.  They also report that people  who believe  “milk makes mucous”  tend to report increased symptoms with milk consumption, while people that do not believe ” milk makes mucous” do not report increased symptoms.   This in itself means nothing, until they point out once again, that people who believe “milk makes mucous”  are easily fooled by a placebo.    The reviewers  go on to say that avoidance of dairy products may lead to limited intake of certain nutrients, specifically calcium.   This might not be a an issue for a cyclist suffering from a short term a headcold, but  fact that I can still enjoy my cheese ravioli for dinner with no fear of extra snot buildup in my head gives me some comfort as I  stay at home recovering ans itching to get back on my bike.

-Sean

In 2003, I wrote about how milk  is an excellent recovery drink: ( this is a very old version of my old coaching site)

Several studies have confirmed that milk is an excellent recovery drink, and  , and works as well as commercially available recovery beverages for both cyclists, and runners.

Heidi thinks you should drink more milk

I

I just recently sat down with one of Crank Cycling’s coached athletes, James Stout, for an interview about his 2010 season. We talked about RAAM, Superweek, Belgium, soft boiled eggs and Marmite.

We did a little ride before our interview,

Hard Ride!

and then poured a home-brew only to find that my microphone wasn’t working. However we did some planning for the coming 2011 season and had a great photo shoot in the process. We recorded our interview over Skype phone 2 days later.

Home-brew Pour

Planning for 2011

Soft Boiled Egg Cup

Soft boiled eggs with toast and vegimite yum!

Check out the pod cast.
James Stout Interview

I just recently sat down with one of Crank Cycling’s coached athletes, James Stout, for an interview about his 2010 season. We talked about RAAM, Superweek, Belgium, soft boiled eggs and Marmite.

We did a little ride before our interview,

Hard Ride!

and then poured a home-brew only to find that my microphone wasn’t working. However we did some planning for the coming 2011 season and had a great photo shoot in the process. We recorded our interview over Skype phone 2 days later.

Home-brew Pour

Planning for 2011

Soft Boiled Egg Cup

Soft boiled eggs with toast and vegimite yum!

Check out the pod cast.
James Stout Interview

We’re going to start a new weekly segment called Recovery Monday. Effective training plans must incorporate appropriate rest and recovery. This column will discuss recovery techniques and trends. So prop your feet up, relax, and read on!

Sleep

Sleep is the most basic and most effective recovery technique for athletes (really any human or mammal for that matter)! An athlete in training should be getting 7-10hrs of sleep DAILY. Recent research has shown that sleep patterns and requirements vary greatly amongst individuals and that this is dependent on genetics. Another recent study indicated that after 10 consecutive days of 6 hours of sleep or less, test subjects performed as though they had missed an ENTIRE night of sleep in the past week. There is debate over one’s ability to overcome this sleep debt; some studies show that individuals can sleep longer for a few days and performances return to normal. In general however we know that sleep deprived athletes perform poorly. Overall sleep deprivation is extremely bad for general health and extend patterns of disordered sleeping patterns must be addressed (there is even an extremely rare fatal form of insomnia which has no known cure – don’t fear there are only 50 known cases). 

So now that I’ve scared you into getting more sleep, let’s talk about the benefits. Sleep is prime time for rejuvenation; your body is in a very anabolic state and all the major systems (muscular, skeletal, nervous, and immune) grow or repair themselves during sleep. Your body secretes more growth hormone while sleeping and the amout of GH is highest during deep REM sleep. Your body will also signal GH release during naps; the post workout nap is a MAJOR recovery tool! NOTE: You want to time your workouts and post workout naps to conform to the normal circadian rhythm; try to complete both workout and nap before 3pm. A 45-60 minute post workout nap is ideal, don’t go longer or it will interfere with normal sleep cycles.

Okay, how do I get more sleep? First, set a routine. Try to get to bed at the same time EVERY night! About 1 hour before bedtime turn off the TV, get off your computer and the internet, put the iPhone down. More studies are indicating that these devices engage our minds actively and interfere with sleep patterns. Spend time with the family or read a book. Most sleep scientists advise against reading in bed so pick a quiet location to read. When it’s bedtime make your room as dark as possible. Wear comfortable clothes or make sure you will be warm/cool enough while sleeping. Wear an eye mask or earplugs if necessary (frequently when I travel to events I wear earplugs, an eye mask, and will use a sleep aid to ensure solid sleep in a hotel or guest house). Sleep aids can be useful to srt a sleep schedule, but long term use should be avoided (consult your Dr). Natural sleep aids like melatonin are definitely better. Try to time sleep so you wake each morning without an alarm clock. If you wake naturally at the appropriate hour each morning this is the ultimate indication you are getting the right amount of sleep.

For all we know about sleep, many aspects are still a mystery. To read more about sleep and your biological clock/circadian rhythm I recommend searching Wikipedia for sleep, sleep debt, and circadian rhythm.

If you have questions about your sleep patterns and recovery, talk to your coach…but if you’re calling or emailling me, do it before 9pm!

Sweet dreams!

Coach Chris